User Reviews

Chris Alexander's Queen of Blood opens with an extraordinary image. The female vampire from Alexander's first film, Blood for Irina, crawls through the shallow part of a lake towards a muddy bank, a trail of blood extending away from her like some sort of umbilical cord, gradually disappearing. The music sounds as if it is being played backwards, adding to the sense of something being wrenched back in time. We'll return to this – in more ways than one. There is something primal about the way Irina crawls out of the water, as if she is being born. Just as we think this we cut to a title card – BIRTH.

This feral, bloodied, naked female figure crawls and claws at the muddied earth as if discovering it for the first time while we see feet in leather shoes approaching her. Civilization and wild humanity are about to meet. The figure in shoes stands over the naked Irina. He is dressed in a professorial grey cardigan and a hat. His grey beard recalls Ginsberg, his round-rimmed spectacles Lennon but the staff he is carrying conveys a more ancient, mystical, Shamanic feel – a Prospero, perhaps. She stares up at him, reaches out to him, stroking his clean hand with her soiled fingers, smearing it with her wet earth. As he stands feeling this, facing ahead, we look at the dark lenses of his glasses and consider that perhaps he is blind – the staff may be for support, stability, guidance. Perhaps he is less Prospero and more Tiresias.

He carries her home… to a cabin in the woods. We know what kind of world this is.

We see him beginning to 'tame' her, dressing her in a gown that is held over her, filling the screen as if it is about to smother her, and cutting her hair with scissors that hover menacingly over her head. There is something sinister, controlling in all of this. We realise he is not blind but the earlier suggestion must have been there for a reason.

He brushes her hair as if she is his doll, his possession. He offers her a mirror and she caresses it in an extraordinarily fetishistic way before taking it and gazing at herself, her face frozen in an expression of surprise and curiosity, as if she is viewing herself for the first time.

And now he kneels in front of her and she raises her hand but it freezes. Is she in some way aware that she might harm him? He certainly does not seem to sense this. Perhaps he is indeed truly 'blind' – unable to see what he really has in front of him, a vicious, predatory creature. Too late. Her hand plunges into his throat, puncturing it, squeezing it, tearing it. She gazes at what she is doing with the same wide-eyed intensity that she regarded herself, as if she is surprised by what she is doing.

Once she has had her fill of the man's blood, Irina stands in the open doorway of his cabin looking out at a sunlit world. Another image of birth. She steps out, walks ahead, towards us, away from this rural idyll. She is making an important journey – it is the journey Little Red Riding Hood makes, covered in blood, away from her grandmother's cottage in the woods having triumphed over the wolf and it is the journey Eve makes from Paradise. In all cases we are dealing with a woman who has lost her innocence and has the marks to show for it.

Indeed, the Eve connection is crucial. Irina has just committed the ultimate act of rebellion against a guiding, God-like figure. Paradise has been corrupted. As if to confirm this we now have a whole series of images juxtaposing beautiful images of nature with images of death and decay, climaxing with an image of a grand oak standing in the sun but with graves leaning against it. And in the midst of all this we encounter a new woman, dressed in black as if in mourning but also caressing her pregnant stomach. Birth and death. Sunlight and graves. Paradise and decay.

We're in a Miltonic world of fevered spiritual fear. A gaunt priest approaches a forbidding church door. He looks frightened. He looks to the skies but there is no comfort there. He looks out at us and we look into him – his fear, his despair, the darkness in his face. The abyss. And as we stare into this abyss the image dissolves into tangled woodland. Here again is our corrupted paradise, at the centre of which is the bloodied figure of Irina. She walks through an increasingly autumnal landscape, the dying trees reflected in sludge like something out of Poe, until she finds a beautiful girl whose tawny ringlets carry a complex sense of innocence, sensuality and autumnal decay and who stands mesmerised by this red-handed Angel of Death, as if she cannot see any danger, only a transfixing sense of beauty.

To discover more of this wonderful film you really must see it for yourself

In this sequel to Chris Alexander's acclaimed 'Blood for Irina (2011)', we first see Irina clawing her way out of a stagnant woodland lake, immersed in mud and mire, a trail of red following a path in her wake. As she revives in a scene that reminds me a little of Virginia Christine's similar resurrection in 'The Mummy's Curse (1944)', she is saved and looked after by a man who lives in a cabin, before he is brutally killed – indicating that Irina has lost none of her killing nature.

There are elements of Jean Rollin's 'The Living Dead Girl' to some of the more gruesome scenes. As an aside, if it weren't for the reviews for the previous film, comparing it to the work of Rollin, I may never have been inspired to become acquainted with the French director's work, so for that I will be ever grateful to Chris Alexander.

The performers are wonderful. Skinny Puppy founder Nivek Ogre has a seemingly great time as The Preacher (especially a bloodily protracted death scene!) and is great in the role. Interestingly, he is dressed in black (which provides a terrific, imposing look), whilst his apparent nemesis (although this is never quite established) floats around in white.

Shauna Henry is bewitching as Irina, truly a mix of the sultry and deadly, enticing and dangerous. She goes through a tough time on this shoot and is rarely seen not streaked with blood and dirt, wading through water and bramble. And throughout, she retains this magnetic, silent, vampiric aura. Which brings the question – is Irina actually a vampire? In the first few scenes we see her gazing at a mirror image and walking out into bright sunshine.

The soundtrack is suitably barren and sparse, ascending to triumphant choral tones when Irina mangles Carrie Gammel's pregnant Widow to death.

The scenes of Irina wandering around a ruined backyard, blood streaked and carrying the sleeping (?) baby are ethereal and strange, because her glowing presence is so out of place. This conjures up moments from the previous film, whose atmospheric heights aren't quite matched here: decay surrounded Irina and was very much central to her story (indeed her rebirth seems to be just that: she seems free of the relentless sickness that gripped her – and framed the story – in the previous film). The misty, dewy, leaf-strewn autumnal wilderness isn't quite as an evocative world in which to place her – but equally, there would be little joy in attempting to replicate what had gone before. Also, and quite rightly, the lush and verdant surroundings create entirely a spirit of their own. It quickly becomes a world on her terms, and assumes an ethereal, heightened reality.

I would love Irina's story to continue in further films of this nature; I would love there to be a huge volume of work about her. She is fascinating. Her journey is fascinating, and these films are captivating and so deserving of any horror fan's time.